Story of us in the Germanic languages

stevethevagabond (53)in #dtube • 5 years ago

I made a mistake at the end. It should be "the loss of n before fricatives was so complete". I would have changed it but I didn't explain what fricatives are. They are the breathy continuous sounds like f, sh, s. You can pronounce them continously like fffffff because they are made by passing air through a specific kind of constriction (each consonant has its own kind of constriction, compare s and f). I wrote the whole script not realising that I didn't explain what fricatives are, oops. And I think that is what contributed to the change.

If you have /u/, /n/ and /s/, it is much easier to remove the sound in the middle if the third sound is a fricative because vowels and fricatives are continuous (you just pronounce them with a stream of air) and an n interrupts that a bit. We know it only affected vowel + n + fricative because there are words in English that have vowel + n + other consonant like strand that survived all the way from Proto Germanic with the n intact.

Maybe it's good I forgot. Now you get a fun addendum to read :)

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